The spider, identified as a Braken Bat Cave Meshweaver, is an endangered, non-venomous species that lives in caves, has no eyes and is virtually translucent. Josh Donat, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Transportation, said the recent discovery is only the second time the species has been spotted in more than 30 years.

"This is the second individual spider that's ever been found,” Donat told FOX 29. “It's not like we found 1 of 5,000 individuals in a species. This is the second time this species has ever been seen by human eyes. The last time it was seen was 32 years ago in 1980 in a little piece of property not far from here." . . . .

The Associated Press reports that the Federal government is checking the film maker for parole violations and the only reason suggested is because he was involved with this movie. Note also how the AP accepts the Obama administration claim that this film maker is responsible for the violence.

Federal authorities have identified Nakoula, a self-described Coptic Christian, as the key figure behind "Innocence of Muslims," a film denigrating Islam and the Prophet Muhammad that ignited mob violence against U.S. embassies across the Middle East. A federal law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Thursday that authorities had connected Nakoula to a man using the pseudonym of Sam Bacile who claimed earlier to be writer and director of the film.

Violent protests set off by the film in Libya played a role in mob attacks in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American officials. U.S. Embassy gates in Cairo were breached by protesters and demonstrations against American missions spread to Yemen on Thursday and on Friday to several other countries. . . . .

UPDATE: A consequence of the Obama administration publicly making an example of Nakoula.

Google hypocrisy on property rights: It is fine for it to "fork" others programing, but not for others to do it to Google

No one really denies that Google forked the Sun's Java when it designed the Android operating system. What concerned Oracle, which had bought Java from Sun, was that Android use of Java was incompatible with Java. Google's successful legal defense largely rested on Tim Bray who had designed Java and Google had hired Bray to work for them a couple of years ago. Here is a statement from Bray:

Which is terrific. I see no downside, and I see huge upside in that the Java mainstream can watch this kind of stuff and (because of the GPL) adopt it if it’s good, and make things better for everybody.

So Google's argument was that when it was doing the forking, it was fine, even good. Obviously, both Sun and Oracle didn't see it the same way and were worried that the incompatibilities would hurt programing for their version of Java.

Well, what a difference a few months makes. Now Google is forcing Acer to drop the release of a new operating system to compete with Android that involves forking of Android. Google of course is now making the same argument against Acer that Oracle made against Google.

"Aliyun OS is not part of the Android ecosystem so of course Aliyun OS is not and does not have to be compatible with Android," said John Spelich, vice president of international corporate affairs for Alibaba. "It is ironic that a company that talks freely about openness is espousing a closed ecosystem." . . .

Google said that while it built its own operating system, Alibaba took elements of Android to build Aliyun. . . .

So didn't Google take parts of Java in building its own operating system? Could someone please tell me what I am missing here? Thank you.

UPDATE: The two examples are becoming even more closely linked. Alibaba claims that its new Aliyun operating system is not a "forked" version of Android, just as Google claimed that Android had not "forked" Java. Google obviously had to eventually concede that it had forked Java, but their defense was that it was great to have a lot of innovation. Will it become clear that not only is Google making the same argument that it railed against before but that Alibaba hasn't forked anything? From CNET:

In a blog post yesterday, Google's Andy Rubin said "the Aliyun OS incorporates the Android runtime and was apparently derived from Android."

CNET asked Alibaba's John Spelich about Rubin's/Google's claims and about whether there are elements of Android in Aliyun, and here's what we got in response: "They have no idea and are just speculating. Aliyun is different." . . .

But Spelich told CNET in an e-mail that Aliyun is "not a fork. Ours is built on open-source Linux." And he added that Aliyun "has our own applications. [It's] designed to run cloud apps designed in our own ecosystem. [It] can run some but not all Android apps."

9/14/2012

University of Colorado still leaves some very important gun-free zones

The problem with making dorms gun-free zones is that if students can't have their permitted concealed handguns where they live, they aren't going to be able to have the guns with them at other places on campus. All college freshmen are required to live on the college campus. Overall, 18,000 students live off campus out of a total of about 28,200 -- thus about 63.8% live off campus. Given that there were about 5,663 new freshmen in the fall of 2011 and a very small additional number of 85 in the Spring of 2012, that means that there are about 4,487 non-freshmen living in campus housing and probably many of those are probably sophomores and juniors. Some are families though it is in family housing that there are some exceptions made for permit holders. Given that permits aren't allowed until the student is at least 21 years of age, the constraint will be binding on only a small fraction of the student body.

However, there is an important concern. There will indeed be certain areas on campus where a killer will know in advance that no one will be able to protect themselves and my guess is that if an attack is going to occur someplace, it will be at one of those locations. Thus, I think that the statement by Jim Geddes shown below is correct. Here is a news story about the changes from the local Boulder, CO newspaper, The Daily Camera.

Regent Jim Geddes, R-Sedalia, said he appreciates campus officials' comprehensive review of gun policies, but has concerns about some of the restrictions.

CU's Boulder campus has banned guns from its dorms and is allowing them in a about a dozen family housing cottages and in a limited number of Athens North family housing units.

Guns are entirely banned from ticketed events, including everything from football games at Folsom Field to concerts in Macky Auditorium.

"At the end of the day, you still have created some gun-free zones on campus," Geddes said. "Creating a gun-free zone without taking some other measures to protect our students within those zones has shown over and over again to be a failed policy." . . .

So was Obama ever offered a tenured position at the University of Chicago Law School

This is a pretty incredible claim. Clearly the New York Times reporter ignored what she was told by Richard Epstein on this score. Nor was it the only thing that she did report in her generally glowing article on Obama. I was also interviewed by Kantor in 2008 about my experiences with Obama and she didn't use any of the material that I gave her because Obama's campaign simply asserted that the conversation didn't happen. From the Daily Caller:

And yet, according to longtime University of Chicago law professor
Richard Epstein, Obama was never actually offered a tenured faculty
position.

“I have no idea where Jodi got her story” about the tenure offer, said
Epstein, adding that he immediately wrote Kantor to tell her she was
wrong. Epstein was, then, a member of the faculty, not the school’s
dean. . . .

Kantor softened her position when asked via Twitter about Obama’s alleged tenure offer.

“[T]he general idea was that tenure would go through,” Kantor replied. “That said, I don’t know the fine print on the offer.” . . .

“I wish I still had my email to Jodi,” he lamented, “because I wrote Jodi Kantor in no uncertain terms that the matter had never come to the faculty, and that under no circumstances would an offer to Obama be tenured. Indeed I was completely taken aback by the story.” . . .

It is hard to see that Obama could get a tenure track position, let alone a tenured position, from the University of Chicago.

Wouldn't you think that a lot of extra security precautions would have been taken on the 9/11 anniversary? Presumably this would be done so as to reduce the probability that a Marine would accidentally shot an Egyptian, though that some would believe a Marine was likely to do that would probably have an irrational fear of guns. In any case, even if that turns out to be false statements from Marines an even worse story comes from the UK Independent:

UPDATE: I also received this information from someone who has been an embassy Marine guard.

MSGs are armed with sidearms. Nowadays they MAY have a few shotguns or rifles, but those will be secured unless the end of the world is coming. And the State Department discourages shooting back. THEY DO NOT have M60s, M240s, M2s, or ANY explosive weapons. Were the Marines denied ammunition? I doubt it. But they were UNDOUBTEDLY under STRICT RULES OF ENGAGEMENT to not lose a round outside the building (i.e. outside nominal U.S. territory) . . .Under the Vienna Convention, host nation security forces are responsible for protecting the integrity of ALL foreign diplomatic missions within the host nation. Theoretically, when host nation intelligence assets determine a threat is developing, or the State Department informs the host nation Foreign Ministry that a credible threat is developing, THEY'RE supposed to beef up external security.Supposed to. And if you think Egyptian and/or Libyan intelligence didn't know what was brewing, I have a unilateral disarmament treaty I'd like to sell you (after all, that IS a State Department function: peace through a position of weakness, with kind words and a bazillion dollar foreign aid check). . . .

"From a budgetary perspective, shorter work hours in the public sector may cause governments to be less efficient in converting tax dollars into public services. More broadly, the perception that government employees do not work as hard as private-sector employees runs counter to the spirit of public service," according to the report.

Heritage found state and local government employees work even fewer hours — 38.1 hours per week or 4.7 weeks less per year than private sector workers.

Heritage used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey to reach its findings. Heritage notes the survey only measures work time and not work effort or work effectiveness.

One federal union called Heritage's findings "utterly misleading."

"Private sector averages are low because so many private, non-union employers provide absolutely no paid time off. No sick leave, no vacation, no holidays. That is the disgrace, not the fact that public sector employers recognize that all workers need some paid time off," said Jacqueline Simon, public policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, in an emailed statement. . . .

Two ways of looking at how hard it is to get a job

If one looks at hires instead of openings as the measure of how many real opportunities there are and includes both the unemployed and those who have given up looking for work, you end up with a quite different graph than what is shown by the WSJ. I would argue that both of these changes give a much more accurate picture of how hard it is to get a job.

9/12/2012

Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius violates Hatch Act

So will Sebelius get a suspension? Will the media give this much coverage? Will it bother Americans that Taxpayers are essentially paying for political campaigning? From Fox News:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius violated federal law when she campaigned this winter for President Obama, federal investigators announced Wednesday.

Sebelius broke the law by making “extemporaneous partisan remarks” during a speech in February at a Human Rights Campaign Event in Charlotte, N.C., according to the Office of Special Counsel (OSC). She made the comments in the city that would later host the Democratic National Convention.

"One of the imperatives is to make sure that we not only come together here in Charlotte to present the nomination to the president, but we make sure that in November, he continues to be president for another four years," Sebelius said, according to the agency and reported first by The Hill newspaper. . . .

the agency investigates at least 100 cases such cases annually with “a great majority” of them being resolved internally and violators getting a suspension. . . .

She also discussed state politics in the Feb. 25 speech, urging voters to defeat a ballot proposal opposing gay marriage and to elect a Democratic governor, according to The Hill.

According to annual data from the Census Bureau, median income adjusted for inflation – a closely watched measure of the financial health of average Americans – fell to $50,054 in 2011, or 1.5 per cent below its 2010 level and 4.1 per cent below its score when Mr Obama took office in 2009.

Although real median income had already started to slide beginning in 2008, before Mr Obama entered the White House, the fact that he was not able to reverse that downward trend could expose him to criticism from Mitt Romney, his rival, that his policies have not aided the middle class. In addition to the drop in overall median income, the data also showed a rise in income inequality last year. . . .

"We found no evidence in Operation Fast and Furious that the ATF or the (U.S. attorney's office) attempted at any point during the investigation to balance the risks to the public safety against the long-term benefits of identifying trafficking networks and participants," the draft report says. . . .

The documents obtained by Fox News, while incomplete, provide an early glimpse into the finger-pointing that will follow the expected release later this week or early next week of the complete IG report. Attorney General Eric Holder has said the report, which will be scrutinized on Capitol Hill, will provide him the basis to discipline or fire those found most culpable.

While the report blames Newell and Voth for poor judgment, attorneys for the two say higher-ups and the entire ATF chain of command were aware of everything they did. . . .

The most important part of the news story might be this:

Attorneys for the three contend that the report's conclusion that the strategy for Fast and Furious was hatched in Phoenix is not true. MacAllister's attorney claims that it was "part of the overall ATF Southwest Border strategy to deal with an international criminal enterprise engaged in firearms trafficking." . . .

UPDATE: Some are pointing to the fact that one of the Fast and Furious guns was used in an assassination plot. But I think that it is a mistake to make this argument because if the criminals wanted to assassinate someone that gun would have simply been replaced with another gun. From the Daily Caller:

The gun — which “was seized in Tijuana in connection with a drug cartel’s conspiracy to kill the police chief of Tijuana, Baja California, who later became the Juárez police chief” — is tied to Fast and Furious. . . .

Obama increases regulations by 7.4% during his first three years

This would imply that Obama could increase regulations by 10 percent or so since he became president. That is pretty incredible given that Obama has only been president for 5% of the time since Roosevelt became president. From CNSNews:

Over the past three years, the bound edition of the Code of Federal Regulations has increased by 11,327 pages – a 7.4 percent increase from Jan. 1, 2009 to Dec. 31, 2011. In 2009, the increase in the number of pages was the most over the last decade – 3.4 percent or 5,359 pages.
Over the past decade, the federal government has issued almost 38,000 new final rules, according to the draft of the 2011 annual report to Congress on federal regulations by the Office of Management and Budget. That brought the total at the end of 2011 to 169,301 pages.
That is more than double the number of pages needed to publish the regulations back in 1975 when the bound edition consisted of 71,244 pages. . . .
Randy Johnson, senior vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, distributed a handout of a Congressional Research Service analysis of a 2008 study commissioned by the Small Business Administration that estimated the annual compliance price for all federal regulations at $1.7 trillion that year.
Seventy percent of the regulations were economic, accounting for $1.236 trillion of the annual cost. The other regulations were, in order of cost, environment regulations ($281 billion), tax compliance ($160 billion) and occupational safety and health and homeland security ($75 billion). . . .

“America is a country founded on guns. It’s in our DNA. It’s very strange but I feel better having a gun. I really do. I don’t feel safe, I don’t feel the house is completely safe, if I don’t have one hidden somewhere. That’s my thinking, right or wrong.

“I got my first BB (air) gun when I was in nursery school. I got my first shotgun by first grade. I had shot a handgun by third grade and I grew up in a pretty sane environment. I was in the U.K. when the shootings happened and I did hear the discussion about gun control start again, and as far as I know it petered out as it always does.

“It’s just something with us. To turn around and ask us to give up our guns… I don’t know, we’re too afraid that we’re going to give up ours and the bad guys are still going to get theirs. It’s just in our thinking. I’m telling you, we don’t know America without guns.”

“Aaron called me and said, 'Mom, you need to wipe your social media clean of any reference to me or any of my buddies. Just disconnect completely,'” Karen Vaughn said her son warned after Vice President Biden publicly identified the SEALs on May 3, 2011 -- two days after the raid. “He [Aaron] actually said to me, 'Mom, there's chatter, and all of our lives could be in danger, including yours' ... then I realized all of those families, you know, you're talking about a community of around three hundred families who were all of a sudden made targets by this administration.” . . .

Among the generally accepted ideas about African-American young-male progress over the last three decades that Becky Pettit, a University of Washington sociologist, questions in her book "Invisible Men": that the high-school dropout rate has dropped precipitously; that employment rates for young high-school dropouts have stopped falling; and that the voter-turnout rate has gone up. . . .

“The Maryland Democratic Party has discovered that Ms. Rosen has been registered to vote in both Florida and Maryland since at least 2006; that she in fact voted in the 2006 general election both in Florida and Maryland; and that she voted in the presidential preference primaries held in both Florida and Maryland in 2008,” wrote Yvette Lewis, the state party chair. “This information is based on an examination of the voter files from both states. We believe that this is a clear violation of Maryland law and urge the appropriate office to conduct a full investigation.” . . .

Is the Obama administration falsifying information on the deportation of illegal aliens

From the Examiner:

. . . Throughout his reelection campaign, President Obama has touted his administration's "historic number of deportations." But many believe the figures given to backup his assertions are fabricated. In fact, members of the Department of Homeland Security have been critical of Obama and his DHS appointees especially those in charge of border security and immigration enforcement. . . .In a surprising move, on August 23 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents filed alawsuit in Texas, which argues that the Obama administration’s amnesty program commands ICE officers to violate federal law and their oaths to uphold and support federal law. . . .The DHS internal documents also reveal a discrepancy between arrests and actual removals. Specifically, ICE has reported 221,656 arrests yet report 334,249 removals for 2012 so far -- a discrepancy of nearly 112,000 removals. ATEP accounts for 72,030 removals within this discrepancy, but there are over 40,000 removals that remain unknown. . . .Internal Department of Homeland Security documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee reveal that President Obama and other administration officials have falsified their record to achieve their so-called historic deportation numbers. . . .Lamar maintains that since 2011 the Obama administration has included numbers from a Border Patrol program that returns illegal immigrants to Mexico right after they cross the Southwest border in their year-end deportation statistics. . . .He claims that a single illegal immigrant can show up at the border and be removed numerous times in a single year – and counted each time as a removal. When the numbers from this Border Patrol program are removed from this year’s deportation data, it shows that removals are actually down nearly 20% from 2009. Another 40,000 removals are also included in the final deportation count but it is unclear where these removals came from.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth penned the book “The Human Stain” about a college professor deemed a racist for an innocent comment he made in class one day, despite the character's secret, African-American heritage. The Wikipedia entry for the book incorrectly noted that it was inspired by the life of writer Anatole Broyard.

But when Roth petitioned to have the mistake corrected, he was told he could not. Roth, the work’s author, wasn’t a reliable enough source.

“When, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the ‘English Wikipedia Administrator’ … that I, Roth, was not a credible source,” the literary lion wrote in an essay “An Open Letter to Wikipedia” in The New Yorker. . . .

The lawyer bringing the suit, Attorney Marc Bern, with the New York city law firm of Napoli, Bern, Ripka and Scholonik, suggested the theater should have had security guards the night of the attack. Yet, checking bags or metal detectors at the front of the theater that night wouldn’t have prevented the attack. The killer brought his guns in through an emergency backdoor.

Armed security guards at movie theaters are rare in low crime areas, such as Aurora, especially on less crowded weeknights. And, with an audience fleeing the theater, armed guards may have experienced difficulty getting quickly inside.

So why did the killer pick the Cinemark theater? You might think that it was the one closest to the killer’s apartment. Or, that it was the one with the largest audience.

GM is losing about $49,000 per Volt that it sells?

If you are going to subsidize every unit of a model car you are selling by $49,000 (plus of course the Federal government is giving another $7,000 tax credit), you would think that you should be able to sell a lot of those cars, right? Apparently, GM still can't get people to buy the Volt.

Cheap Volt lease offers meant to drive more customers to Chevy showrooms this summer may have pushed that loss even higher. There are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in a vehicle that cost as much as $89,000 to produce.

And while the loss per vehicle will shrink as more are built and sold, GM is still years away from making money on the Volt, which will soon face new competitors from Ford, Honda and others.

GM's basic problem is that "the Volt is over-engineered and over-priced," said Dennis Virag, president of the Michigan-based Automotive Consulting Group. . . .

GM's quandary is how to increase sales volume so that it can spread its estimated $1.2-billion investment in the Volt over more vehicles while reducing manufacturing and component costs - which will be difficult to bring down until sales increase. . . .

More evidence of how Google copied Apple for its ideas

Ever wondered why Google was able to so quickly provide a copy of the iPhone but took so long to copy the iPad. If Google was able to come up with the idea of their phone on their own, why was it so difficult for them to come up with a Tablet. It might be that Google has to see what some one else is doing on a lot of ideas before they do it themselves. The Cult of Mac has this discussion:

Because despite the fact that Schmidt was still on Apple’s board during 2008-2009, he didn’t get so much as a peek at the iPad. He didn’t even know it existed, because Steve Jobs made sure he was kept in the dark about its development. We all know how Apple’s co-founder felt about Google’s answer to the iPhone, and he didn’t want a repeat of that for the iPad.

Google wasn’t “late” to the smartphone party, because Schmidt knew exactly how to crash it. But without any knowledge of the iPad before its launch, it took him and Google a whole lot longer to come up with a competitor. . . .

9/09/2012

So much for the Democrats claim that they want to control the deficit

Among the 21 new spending proposals included in the Democratic Party platform are:• $453 billion over ten years to fund an expansive stimulus-like job creation scheme;• $18.4 billion over ten years to get the transportation sector to buy into alternative fuels:• $6.5 billion over five years for global food security and agriculture research;• $5 billion in one-time funding for clean energy handouts;• $5 billion in one-time funding to force the government into the broadband Internet business;• $980 million over ten years for government-funded abortions (if taxpayers' pay for 10 percent of abortions); and• $45 million over five years to support American Indian and Alaska Native languages.In total, the Democratic Party platform recommends $674.8 billion in additional federal spending over the next decade. . . .

David Plouffe on why Obama should veto the 2011 debt agreement between Democratic and Republican Congressional leaders: “We will not get credit for doing anything."

Bob Woodward on Obama's haphazard way of dealing with the debt limit talks and his concern to get credit for any budget agreement. Congress was upset that Obama had defaulted on a deal at the last moment, and now Obama was upset that he would be left out of the deal.

. . . Reid arrived in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, David Krone. . . .It was highly unusual for someone to pass the ball so completely to a staffer. The 44-year-old Krone outlined the plan, including a secret Republican pledge to count $1 trillion in savings from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan toward deficit reduction. That was surprising. Earlier, Boehner had not been willing to accept this accounting gimmick.“I don’t trust these guys,” the president said dismissively. Krone either would not or could not conceal his anger. . . .“Mr. President, I am sorry — with all due respect — that we are in this situation that we’re in, but we got handed this football on Friday night. And I didn’t create this situation. The first thing that baffles me is, from my private-sector experience, the first rule that I’ve always been taught is to have a Plan B. And it is really disheartening that you, that this White House did not have a Plan B.” Several jaws dropped as the Hill staffer blasted the president to his face. . . .“You can’t veto,” Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the group. “You cannot be responsible for default.” Anything had to be done to prevent it. Anything to preserve the global economy.“If he caves,” said David Plouffe, Obama’s senior political adviser, “it will have long-lasting political repercussions that we may never get out of. If we draw a line in the sand on something this important and cross it, we may never be able to come back.”Accepting a two-step deal would not work, Plouffe said. “We will not get credit for doing anything. We’ll look like we got bullied by a bunch of very unpopular and irresponsible people.”Geithner had to deal with the possibility that the House bill could reach Obama’s desk. “My recommendation to the president would be, we’ve got to sign this. If that’s what they offer us, we sign it.” . . .

France's richest man moves to Belgium, coincidence?

Is it just a coincidence that Bernard Arnault, France's richest man and chief executive of luxury group LVMH, is moving to France at the same time that the country is increasing its top tax rate to 75 percent? Arnault says that his move was not triggered by the tax hike. Note though that he just happened to make a similar move during the last Socialist presidency, though that time he moved to the US.

The Financial Times reports that even Mr. Hollande's government recognizes that incentives matter. More bizarrely they are exempting sports and movie stars. Might they think that sports and movie stars are the most mobile?

On Wednesday, Bernard Arnault, France’s richest man and head of the luxury goods group LVMH, met Jean-Marc Ayrault, the prime minister, for talks in which he was reported to have discussed the impact of the government’s tax plans.

Responding to business concerns, Pierre Moscovici, the finance minister, said last week that the 75 per cent levy would be introduced in “an intelligent manner” to avoid prompting an exodus of high earners.

The websites of the newspapers Les Echos and Le Figaro reported yesterday that the 75 per cent rate would include other marginal taxes that would in effect render the new rate at 67 per cent. They said it would be limited to salary, with sports and other professional stars able to avoid the tax. . . .